I appreciate it! I am hoping that I can get this all dialed in, and fix any leaks / drafts before the winter hits, so I can stay cozy all winter :tup:
Is your house empty?lol Sounds like you need more mass to stabilize the temps. You know kind of like if you keep a case of beer in your fridge it runs less often. lol
Hah, I can fill my house with beer 
I put the heat shrink plastic on all my windows and door seal on my non-used winter doors. Brick house with insulated crawl space. My house stays a comfortable 68-70°F when I am up and about and a mild 64-66°F when I am gone. Dropping your temp more than 5° during the winter season, IMO, is pointless. Let me rephrase; It is pointless if your house sucks really hard and you have shitty insulation, single pane windows, and the bitch can’t close the fucking front door all the way when she gets her skank ass out the door in the morning so you wake up to frosted nuts or snow all over your floor upon your return.
Instead of trying to save money on how many times your furnace kicks on you should survey all exterior openings and properly seal them.
The year before last I played the thermostat game and my heat kicked on about 3 times an hour when I wanted to be toasty. I sealed up my shit and my heat kicks on maybe once every 1.5 hours.
OK, I see that now. Looks like for a Gas unit, there are really only 2 options.
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Hey man, check out this thread on hvac-talk…seems like some really good info if you read between the lines on the specific issue
example:
A 90%+ furnace should always be 3, as the warm up time makes it inefficient to run at 5. An 80% furnace can operate at either setting…5 will give you slightly less temperature variation in your house, 3 will provide you with slightly more efficiency (and slightly longer equipment life).
For most 80% applications, a setting of 3 will be OK, but I would recommend talking with your contractor and make sure there isn’t any warranty issues with the manufacturer. Getting into installer setup can lead to issues for DIY’ers, as changing other settings can quickly lead to problems that could turn out costly.
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Info from hvac-talk (from link I posted)
In the stat world, there are a few different ways to control temperature.
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“Droop” control - this is where the thermostat will turn on the equipment after the room temperature has “drooped” a certain amount. For instance, if the set point is 70 degrees, the stat will switch on the equipment when the temperature gets to 69.5 degrees or something…
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“Droopless” control - this is how the Honeywell stat you have works. It takes into consideration the CPH setting, the P+I algorithm (essentially an integral that takes into consideration the time and temperature away from the set point) and the ‘thermal characteristics’ of your house. The thermal characteristics of your house are “learned” in the stat and used to develop ‘heat ramps’ that tells the stat when to turn the equipment on and off.
When you add multiple stages into the mix, the Honeywell stat will create multiple heat ramps and essentially calculate when the equipment is running at 90% (a somewhat simple explanation of a very complex process). As soon as this condition is met, the stat will upstage to the next heat or cool stage. This is where you are truly losing the efficiency of your system, as the single stage stat has no concept of upstaging, the equipment simply upstages after a certain amount of time, even if the first stage would have gotten you to your setpoint (and saved you money). A multi-stage stat solves both the “upstage” issue you have and the excessive cycling you now have…
Some work that way, some don’t
gosh, another good post on heat cycle Please explain "Heating cycle rate" - Page 2
Thanks, good information :tup:
I went home to sign for a freight shipment and the house was 67. It was set at 70 until 7:45am at which point it went down to 65. Since the furnace would only heat until 65 and then shut off the instant it hit 66 I’m going to say that 67 means the furnace has not run since 7:45 this morning and I lost 3 degrees over 6 hours.
Well that’s interesting. The time delay is meant to keep multi-stage furnaces without multi-stage thermostats from cycling so often that they spend most of their time in an inefficient warmup stage. If the house loses heat fast enough (but then heats up really quick too if your house is small and your furnace is big) then it will be quickly cycling on and going through warmup and then shutting off shortly after hitting full efficiency stage. So it’s guaranteeing (with made up numbers for the sake of understanding) that you spend 8 minutes in warmup and 12 minutes in full efficiency rather than 8 minutes in warmup and 2 minutes in full efficiency twice. It’s going to effectively widen the dead band making your house swing temperature up and down (which in itself is bad for efficiency and comfort) but make your furnace operate more efficiently.
Mmm this crow sure tastes good. :io:
yeah, thats exactly right
at 3 cycles per hour you get large swings in temp, but your furnace runs pretty efficiently for that time. It could somewhat explain why he is getting large drops in temp, but I still think there is an underlying cause for the swings during this time of the year (mild weather).
Screw the efficiency, I wouldn’t want my furnace staying on/off like that because it would be really uncomfortable in the house with it going from too hot to too cold all the time.
I refuse to have to dress in layers in my house so I can keep adjusting to the swinging temperature.
right, there are pros and cons
kind of like choosing function over form debates here
Well, it makes me realize there will be more research when it comes time to replace my older furnace. If getting the super high efficiency model means having to live with much larger temp swings I’ll go with the less efficient model and just deal with the gas bills.
well, it’s not a requirement to cycle it at that rate. That’s up to the thermostat to change, which you can configure. It just means you won’t be running your new furnace at it’s optimum efficiency level for very long.
I’ve got to figure that a properly sized and tuned furnace won’t spend a very high fraction of its time in the warmup cycle. This has me interested so I’ll see what mine does tonight. I had a 95% 2-stage Amana put in by Capital Heating a couple of years ago so I’ve got to figure it’s sized and tuned properly. I’ll time how long it warms up, how long it runs full blast, and how many times an hour it does it for neon since I was a cock in the beginning of this thread. 
if you have a multi-stage thermostat you shouldn’t have any problems with a multi-stage furnace
Mark, if your heater keeps kicking on then you need to address the insulation or traffic in and out of your home. Simple things like doors and windows being left open or opened a lot will cause this. Also, you may want to look into re-insulating the entire house better either by gutting the walls or spraying in some form of insulation.
Your home (in a perfect world) is a near excellent closed, controlled environment with very minimal leakage. If your heat is constantly kicking on at these mild temps outside, then you have some issues to address with respect to insulation. Imagine how bad it will be when it hits 10 or so…
The digital thermostats are more accurate, so it tends to magnify imperfections in your insulation scheme than old mercury filled slide units…welcome to being a home owner of an older home!